I'm a writer, artist, and game developer. Currently working on Unknown Station Echo, a translation-based mystery.
dutch person here! given that it's one of english's closest relatives 'english with a funny accent' honestly isn't all that far off from the truth
There are only two languages in the world you can spell fully with ASCII, aka the Basic Latin alphabet: English, and Dutch*. And that's why us Dutch use the US English keyboard layout too. 😊
*While Dutch has the IJ letter, this is almost always written as the Latin characters instead of a digraph.
I heard a dutch person calling german "just drunk people dutch" and I felt like spiderman-pointing-at-spiderman.jpg
I was delighted to see signs for “Telefoon” there and pronounce the word that way to this day
Is this really true? Duolingo insists to me that I need the diacritics in a phrase like "één ingrediënt"
The diacritics are always optional. In your example, the accent aigu on "één" is used to emphasize that it's "one" ingredient, not "a" ingredient, as that can be confusing otherwise. It would still be correct Dutch without diacritics. As for the word "ingrediënt," the umlaut does not change the letter sound (like it does in German), but it's to let the speaker know that the word is pronounced "in-greh-die-ent," not "in-gruh-dient."
